Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

Author: Paul Johnson

"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read."           

—New York Times Book Review

A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.

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1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘An Interesting Madman’
2. Shelley, or the Heartlessness of Ideas
3. Karl Marx: ‘Howling Gigantic Curses’
4. Henrik Ibsen: ‘On the Contrary!’
5. Tolstoy: God’s Elder Brother
6. The Deep Waters of Ernest Hemingway
7. Bertolt Brecht: Heart of Ice
8. Bertrand Russell: A Case of Logical Fiddlesticks
9. Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘A Little Ball of Fur and Ink’
10. Edmund Wilson: A Brand from the Burning
11. The Troubled Conscience of Victor Gollancz
12. Lies, Damned Lies and Lillian Hellman
13. The Flight of Reason